Weak Hearts, Broken Minds
by afinemess5
Summary: A short, two-part oneshot explaining the worst season of television ever.
1. I

[A/N: A short, two-part oneshot to post while I work on another, longer piece. Season 5 needed an explanation, so here's mine.]

Disclaimer: They aren't mine.

Weak Hearts, Broken Minds

I.

_This is how I'll die_.

It was the last thing I thought before I blacked out and the first thing I thought when I woke up.

My heart, you know. My heart, which my mother told me I wore on my sleep with her face half-proud, half-sad, as though she knew what life had in store for me. Blocked arteries, too much work for my aorta, the usual.

I thought it as I stood in the foyer when I felt like an elephant had sat on my chest. Most terrifying of all, I didn't even think about Babcock and using that image against her. She stood in front of me, her back to me, and I could tell by the way she laughed that she'd just insulted me. Silly old fool, she always laughs the hardest at her own jokes. Oh, hell, I don't have to pretend like I don't think it's endearing. It is.

I thought it as I fell. _This is how I'll die_. A heart attack at 47. There are more tragic things in the world, after all. (And wouldn't it have been my luck that the last thing I ever saw would have been the back of her? Not a bad view, of course, but even the most spiteful God could have granted a man one more chance to see her face.)

I thought it again when I woke up. The elephant was gone, but it didn't change anything. Now, I saw the end. What are the chances of having a second heart attack? Better yet, what are the chances of _surviving_ a second heart attack? Too high for my liking. I never looked it up. Who wants to know the numbers? What good have numbers ever done anyone?

It's a strange thing, facing your own mortality. I suppose I should count myself lucky—an Oxford-educated butler doesn't have much room to consider luck, no, but indulge me—that I never experienced the sort of death that makes you think about life more. This isn't to say that Mrs. Sheffield's death didn't affect me in a very deep way because it did—but it was still separate from me. I still have both parents. Grandparents, no, but they passed away early in my life.

I never had to think about my own life as a _life_, as something that could end, and so suddenly being thrust in Death's spotlight—it didn't sit well with me. I never considered myself old but how strange to look at someone just one year my junior, Mr. Sheffield, and feel positively _ancient_. The rich age better, I suppose, but the weariness with which I greeted my nights far surpassed the exuberant energy that grabbed hold of Mr. Sheffield and allowed him to either take out Miss Fine or run from her, depending on the day. I was so tired. And so old.

And, after the heart attack, so weak. I mistakenly thought that, a week after laying in a hospital bed, I could get up and take a walk. I can barely fathom the embarrassment I felt when my legs wiggled like Jell-O and failed me like my heart just had.

How can a man who remembers his 15th birthday clear as day look down and not recognize his own feet?

Far from helping, the instructions and directions and suggestions upon my hospital release made me feel even worse. The doctor suggested a heart rate and oxygen monitor. Best not to overexert myself. I nearly laughed in his face when he told me not to have sex for 6 months. No worries there, Doc.

What if I had died? How would the world have been affected? Such were the nature of the thoughts that plagued me as I laid in that hospital bed. If the questions sound depressing, best not to fill you in on the answers. (I experienced a moment of true self-loathing and even more shame when I suddenly and randomly thought: _At least Mrs. Sheffield had dozens of mourners at her funeral. _She had people who had loved her so intensely that they couldn't imagine life without her.)

If the heart attack had done me in, people would grieve, certainly. My parents would likely mourn the fact that their son had beaten them by just a few years. Maxwell, my oldest friend, would feel sorrow but part of him, I know this for a fact and say it without the intention of receiving pity, would worry about who would fold his socks just the way he likes it. The Fines would miss my crème brulee.

What a legacy, eh? Folded socks and torched desserts.

In short, there was no one who loved me so much that his or her life would be irrevocably changed without me.

Though I suppose that isn't _entirely_ true. I realized this as I came out of my medication fog and saw a blonde angel coming towards me. I wasn't sure if I'd died and, if so, which direction I'd gone in. (Satan was an angel at one point, let's not forget.)

But I wasn't dead, it wasn't an angel, and I supposed I wasn't entirely alone. There was CC.

Yes, there was CC. Speaking to me softly, kindly, like an invalid, like an old, old man who'd just had a heart attack in front of her. Even after I tried to prank her, she pulled back the curtain and let loose a torrent of expletives and threats against the couple who were…ah…coupling on the hospital bed next to mine. Relief, utter relief, at seeing CC be CC again—but after she sent Max and Fran scurrying and muttering apologies in my direction, she turned back to me and spoke quietly and carefully, as though Death were hovering in the room.

It was with no small amount of shame that I embarked on my road to recovery that summer, but it was with a lot of regret that I saw how CC treated me now. I don't think anyone could reasonably claim that CC and I weren't heading towards something that year. She blew me a kiss! Right after she insulted me (God, she was getting so good at it, too), she salved the wound with a blown kiss. Weeks earlier, we'd danced next to a fire.

So I tried to be a little more worthy. I exercised more, I tried to watch what I ate, and I foolishly dyed my hair black. (Please don't suggest I did it to look like Maxwell. Perhaps I did. I'd rather leave that stone unturned. I can't take much more shame.) What a convoluted sense of humor God must have—I try to be a more deserving man and the next time CC sees me, I'm hooked up to a catheter.

It only made the summer unbearable. The way she treated me after the heart attack…I had to poke and prod to get a reaction from her. Most of the time, she smiled politely and asked if she could get anything for me. I finally lobbed the elephant comment her way and joked that she was the one who'd caused my heart attack…though that was not well received, I'm afraid.

I wanted more than anything to move forward with her, and I had no idea how.

The little things that had once meant so much—she blew me a kiss! we danced!—suddenly seemed so small. Mr. Sheffield, a man even more oblivious than I, managed to form a relationship with Fran. He proposed. They were forming a life, the kind of life that can be measured and qualified. The kind of life that, if lost, would be grieved and mourned. In the face of that, my history with Babcock seemed rather pathetic. We kissed twice. She laughed a few times at something I said. Hard to build a life on that. Hard to imagine someone mourning over that.

But she refused, she _refused_, to treat me the same after my heart attack. I tried, in my own non-trying way, to get closer to her. And when that didn't work, I went the opposite way. (Facing one's mortality does not make one more mature, I've discovered.)

Misery must not love company because mine did not notice its twin in her. Now, I like to tell myself that I saw her slipping, that I noticed something wasn't quite right, but I don't know if that's true. But I do know that I _should_ have. I should have seen what was happening to her. I should have noticed. It's what we did, after all, if we did nothing else. We noticed each other.

How terrible it must have been for her to think I wasn't noticing her.


	2. II

II.

_This is how it ends_.

That's what I thought when I woke up, strapped to a bed with an IV connected to my left arm. This is how it goes, this is my life now: strapped to a bed when there's no place I'd even try to go.

What a way to go. Not the best of views, no: sterile white walls, sterile white ceilings, sterile white sheets, sterile white machines. As though the road to mental health recovery allows no color. I looked down at my flabby white arms, my veiny hands, my colorless nails. I didn't recognize any of it. So much for knowing something _like the back of your hand_. I couldn't pick mine out of a lineup.

Still, I thought I'd be more surprised to wake up in a hospital. I'm not sure how people can claim to be confused when they wake up in a hospital. The smell alone gives it away. And it isn't like I woke up thinking I was in a swanky hotel on a tropical vacation. A _mental_ hospital, though—well, that was a little more surprising. But then, it wasn't really.

Anyway, back to the end. I thought it was mine. I didn't think I'd _died_, nothing melodramatic like that. But I looked up at the IV drip and thought: yeah, ok. I'll spend the rest of my life in the hospital.

It's surprisingly hard to care about your life when you have so little going on in it.

I don't want pity. I don't want platitudes. I want…well, that's the problem, isn't it? I have no idea. But I'm fairly certain I don't want any of my life prior to the hospital stay.

Well, that isn't entirely true. But when you weigh the parts of my life I like against the parts I don't…

I've never led the fullest life or the most fulfilling life but there were things I had: a good job, a nice figure, a cute dog, a few friends, an annoying butler. But all of those things started slipping away, alarmingly fast but so effortlessly, and I began to wonder if I'd ever had them in the first place.

Let's start at the end again, shall we? The butler. Did it all start with his heart attack? Yes and no. Something happened that day, something terrible and terrifying and terri-everything. I realized something that I'd never once considered before—and that isn't the type of hyperbole we voice in the face of tragedies: I never saw this coming! I had no idea! She was always so quiet! No, I truly had never, ever thought it before—that I could lose him.

Sure, maybe a few times I'd given thought to what would happen if he met a maid and had servant babies in one of the outer boroughs. But that was a different kind of losing him—that way seemed far less likely and so distant that I never needed to worry about it.

But _this_ way of losing him…it was permanent. It was real. And I had absolutely no control over it. (As if I could ever lose ground to a maid and the outer boroughs. Please.) The scariest moment of my life was when I set him up not once but twice for an easy insult and I got nothing. The silence that hung in the air opened up my mind to a host of scenarios in which I'd never hear that voice insulting me again. Maybe it says something about me that _that_ was the scariest moment and not the actual heart attack. Who knows.

Either way, there it was. I could lose him. Let's cut past the _CC Babcock cares for a domestic?_ faux shock and move on to the meatier matters: I'd seen Niles almost every day for the past 15 years. He was dependable and sturdy, if irritatingly so, and the possibility of losing _that_ rent some small but very real tear in my psyche. I couldn't comprehend it but I couldn't stop thinking about it, either. I didn't sleep for two days. It became an obsession. Instead of using it as an opportunity to perhaps appreciate the fact that he hadn't died, I couldn't stop imagining that he had. I couldn't get past it.

Not even when he was finally released from the hospital. I talked to him in the irritating way people talked to my grandfather: hushed and soft, as though the slight breeze from your words could be enough to knock them over for good. I saw how much it bothered him but even though I saw it, I didn't really know it.

So then Niles did what Niles does: he perceived rejection so he rejected me first. I didn't care. I couldn't stop thinking about what his funeral would have been like.

What was next on my list? Right: a few friends. My entire world became encapsulated in that house, so I'll just focus on the people in it. No, Nanny Fine was never a close friend to me, but we occasionally bonded. With the emergence of her relationship with Maxwell (and likely my behavior in response to that), she pulled away. Maxwell, always a flight risk, showed even less interest in my life than usual. Did I care? It's hard to tell. All I could think about was how a woman only a year my junior could have so many of the things I was never even sure I wanted: a man who loved her, children who adored her, a relationship, an engagement. Marriage and more children soon to follow, almost certainly.

What had I done wrong? No, precisely, I need someone to tell me. I'd gotten an education, I made a name for myself on Broadway (Bitch of Broadway is a name, right? Secretly I'm quite proud of it), I dressed how I was supposed to dress and acted the way I was supposed to act. I molded my personality to be who I thought others wanted—I don't know _what_ Chandler's problem was, I know he wanted me to be a doting, desperate woman—and yet I was never quite successful in the way that Nanny Fine was successful. She had no shortage of friends. Her parents loved her "unconditionally" (who knew unconditional love was actually a thing?). She was just as desperate and clingy with Maxwell as I was with Chandler…and yet.

So that's where I'd been: every time I looked at Niles, I thought of his death; every time I looked at Fran, I saw her winning a race I should have lapped her in by miles.

Then there was Chester. No surprises there: he, too, likes Fran more than he likes me. And it's almost poetic, or maybe like a Greek tragedy, or something else from literature: a dog I never wanted prefers everyone else over me. Not a big deal, no, but when you put it with everything else, it's rather miserable, don't you think?

A nice figure. It wasn't every man's preference but I liked it. Hourglass, shapely, curvy, however you want to put it: I liked it. I'd heard horror stories about what happens to a woman's body when she crosses the 30-year threshold, but I passed the first half of that decade smoothly. Then something happened, I don't know what, and I disappeared under mounds of flesh. As I languished in the hospital bed for weeks, my muscles atrophying even more, I imagined all of the misery I'd pushed outward onto other people had suddenly become bound up in me until I ballooned from the heft of it. I don't even know if Niles noticed.

Which leaves my job. Maybe I could have been successful elsewhere, but I enjoyed working with Maxwell (most of the time). But he flat-out stopped listening to my suggestions—sure, Maxwell, Broadway is ready for a hip-hop musical produced by the whitest man of all time—and I think what really did it, what made me see how far I'd sunk in his professional estimation, was when Nanny Fine (a woman with no academic credentials, no producing experience, and no business acumen) found our lead and they slammed the door in my face.

I don't remember much after that.

I heard the play flopped. Good.

Between my obsessions, I didn't have time for many other thoughts, but I suppose I was pretty angry that no one in the house seemed to notice or care that I wasn't quite myself.

So. Back to the end. That's what I thought this was. That was my first thought.

My second thought wasn't a thought as much as an observation: _Oh. Niles is here. _That didn't surprise me, either.

What _did_ surprise me was how he looked at me so, so sadly.

My third thought was: _Maybe he did notice me_.


End file.
